Li-Fi paves a new future for lighting

Professor Harald Haas coined the term Li-Fi in 2011. The technology uses ordinary LED room lights to transmit data around the house.
According to BBC, Li-Fi can use multiple lights in a room without interference.
As connected devices become more popular it is predicted that Wi-Fi networks will not be able to cope with demand.
Li-Fi enables devices to use their in-built stand by LED lights to transmit data.
As LED lights become more popular, multiple companies are looking into using Li-Fi including, Disney Research and the Berlin-based, Fraunhofer Institute.
“LEDs have the property that we can change the light that comes out of an LED very, very quickly. That change in the brightness is what we exploit in order to encode data extremely fast, so that the receiver will be a decoder, a photo detector, which will then see these changes in the light intensity in a way a human eye would not be able to detect. To a human eye, it would be simply constant light, but for a photo detector, it is a change in the intensity, and then we have algorithms that recover these changes in intensity and get back the data stream,” Haas says.
There are many advantages to using LEDs to transmit information. For one thing, LEDs can communicate much faster than Wi-Fi. At 15 gigabits per second, LEDs are more than twice as fast as the fastest Wi-Fi.
What’s more, the visible light spectrum is about ten thousand times larger than the radio spectrum. This would allow communication systems to not only use a huge amount of free spectrum, but use a spectrum that’s already been set up.
“We can use vast amount of free spectrum, which is unlicensed and basically installed everywhere. ... It’s in cars, in our LED lights at home, in streetlights and so on. It’s ubiquitous, it’s already there. We can use existing infrastructure in creating a very efficient sort of cellular communication,” Haas said.
Li-Fi would also be more secure than WiFi. Because light can’t go through walls, people would not be able to log on to Li-Fi networks in the same way that they’re able to log on to and eavesdrop in on ongoing WiFi communications.
Haas argues that Li-Fi would also be available in places where communication is typically difficult.
“We can use Li-Fi in areas where we traditionally can’t use radio, such as on the water, or intrinsically unsafe environments like petrochemical plants or oil rigs, everywhere where an antenna could spark an explosion,” Haas added.